Apple pushes for a prettier, more social world

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Apple has detailed how our lives will be even more connected and in higher definition at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, as it looks to distance itself even further from Google.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 5,000 developers, and Pocket-lint, Apple’s top execs took to the stage one after another to detail how over the coming months we will be even more connected thanks to a number of new features and hardware being rolled out.

Take the new MacBook Pro with its Retina display for example. The new laptop, which can cost up to £3,000, will show you your digital world at an even higher resolution than ever before.

Everything will seem crisper, everything clearer, and everything at four times the resolution of your HD TV. But it’s not just the MacBook range that promises to make everything look better but new Apple software too.

Apple’s Photo Stream feature, already available in iOS 5, will get a new sharing feature in iOS 6 for example. It will let you select photos from the Photos app, tap the Share button, and choose who you want to share your photos with. Grandparents will never again have to nag for pictures of your children.

Friends using iCloud on an iOS 6 device or a Mac running Mountain Lion get the photos delivered immediately in the Photos app or iPhoto, while Apple TV owners will get it on their TV.

Even if they don’t own an Apple device there is no escaping, with the company creating a website to not only share images, but also to lure friends in to your wonderful digital world of sharing.

When you aren’t sharing your holiday snaps you can now do the same with Facebook. Twitter loses the exclusivity it previously enjoyed, with Facebook getting a share option, too. You can share images at the press of a button, as well as apps, and seeing Facebook events in the Calendar. It’s now a lot easier to party.

Your life is amazing and Apple is making it even easier to let you tell everyone that's the case.

To arrange all these parties, holidays and meet-ups, iOS 6 will come with even more syncing features that continue to blur the lines with OS X Mountain Lion. The company’s new desktop operating system will sync Reminders, Notes, and documents all without your having to worry about the how or the why.

Also on the desktop side of things Apple is making sure you don’t even have to turn your computer on to get the latest from your world. Power Nap is a new feature that will download your email and other details such as your calendar, while your MacBook is shut, so when you do open it you save time and just get on with sorting out your correspondence. Clever stuff.

Then there's Siri: it’s getting even more involved in everyday tasks. You’ll be able to tell your phone what app to load, ask it questions to save you Googling something, or just dictate your Facebook status updates.

It’s not just about talking to your phone though, it’s about Apple controlling how you search as well. In five years' time will we still use Google, or will Siri just pick the best answer from dozens of different sources? We suspect so.

What is clear from this year’s WWDC is that Apple continues to show its world is all about the experience. It is all about trying to make your life easier and the millions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac users already out there will welcome that.